Smarter Everyone, Smarter Everything, Smarter Everywhere

As we start off the business of a new decade, I already find myself looking forward to the improvements in XForms 1.2.

I know, I know, we just released the XForms 1.1 Recommendation, which contained a huge bundle of new features and architectural improvements. Still, the working group has been energetically advancing on still more features and improvements even as we closed the loop on the W3C process in the latter half of last year. I am very pleased with the completion of XForms 1.1, but the only constant is change, and we have an excellent array of new technical results to achieve in XForms.

The working group has put a fair bit of effort into the triage of features to separate nearer term (and simpler) objectives from those features of a more architecturally significant nature, which tend to get put in the "XForms 2.0" bucket.

My personal favorite "simple" feature is model-based UI switching with the switch element. This may seem like a bit of a nerdy thing to perseverate on, but the switch element is the only UI control we have that is not directly controllable by a UI binding to data. So, if a form author wants to switch UIs based on a user input, such as changing the payment details UI based on the selection of a payment, then the form author typically resorts to using group elements and the relevant model item property. But this is more than just the sense of completion we'll get from being able to say *all* UI controls can be declaratively linked to data. And it's more than just the satisfaction we'll get from providing the right tool for the job. The ability to declaratively link the state of a switch to data is critical to the save/reload web application pattern and the transaction digital signature web application pattern.

Other web application standardization efforts are focused mainly on what happens during execution of a single web page. XForms-based technogies are a step ahead because they can more easily address the user patterns related to collaboration on the web. Whether it is one user saving an application context and reloading it again in the future, or whether one user provides data to be loaded by a second user, the simple fact remains that data can be in any state along a continuum between empty template and fully completed, so web applications need to be declaratively responsive to that continuum. And nowhere is this clearer than when a web-based transaction is of high enough value to warrant a digital signature. A digital signature needs to be able to capture the full current state of the web application, and having a declarative binding to the data is the easiest way to achieve that goal since it means one can simultaneously sign the web application page template(s) and the data as separate resources.

For the record, Lotus Forms has for a few years now used a legitimate XForms extension mechanism, the xfdl:state attribute, to support model-based switching. We deemed this extension critical to our ability to address our customers' requirements for the above two web application patterns. Standardized integration of XForms with XML Signatures and other advanced security features like XAdES is, so far, in the XForms 2.0 bucket.

In conclusion, I'm not necessarily saying this is the "biggest" feature of XForms 1.2, only that it is my fave. I'll be giving some coverage to the other XForms 1.2 features in future blog posts, so please click the 'follower' button above (top right) and stay tuned.